Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

Business

Marketing in India Today

Whenever a friend or family goes abroad and asks if I’d like anything, I always cheekily ask for a magazine or newspaper. This is partly because I like reading about news from a fresh perspective and partly because I like to know what the ads are like.

I was recently given a copy of India Today, a weekly topical news magazine. The Indian perspective on the world is nothing new to me, but the advertising has moved on somewhat since I last really looked at it.

The immediately noticeable innovation is that the front cover is less wide than the rest of the magazine. This allows a thin strip from the advert on the first page to be present on the cover. It’s a clever way of giving advertisers greater exposure without compromising the cover.

India Today

As you move through the magazine, there’s a definite sense that the ads are there to drive sales and only drive sales. There’s little or no advertising that focuses on brand positioning. There’s certainly nothing that tries to make you feel warm and fuzzy or capture the feeling of a particular moment.

This Volkswagen advert (below), for example, tells you the product’s stylish, throws some features at you and then tell you to text a number to arrange a test drive.

Volkswagen ad

The call to send a text message recurs throughout the ads in the magazine. From test drives to paint colour charts, all can be arranged by sending a text. There’s also a whole host of QR codes.

Essentially, where marketing teams in the UK put social media information to build engagement. Marketers in India put direct links to sell. Both sets of marketers are taking advantage of new technology, but the Indians are bypassing the sophistry of relationships in favour of building revenue.

Train punctuality: Are we measuring the wrong thing?

Commuters constantly complain about how awful British train services are.

We complain about ticket prices but are told that the increases are needed to pay for better services in the future and to offset reductions in government subsidies (the jam tomorrow argument).

Commuters also complain about capacity: there are never any seats available, if you manage to get on a train at all. This issue is often met with the dual refrain of suggesting we work more flexibly and that capacity is being increased (using those record increases in fares).

Most of all, however, we complain about delays. Whether it’s signal failure, leaves on the line or the wrong kind of snow, there’s always a delay of some sort to contend with. The response is often that we’re wrong. That services actually run quite well, some lines are among the best in Europe for train punctuality.

Here’s a question that’s not often asked: what if train punctuality is a false measure? Perhaps commuter punctuality is what we should really care about? Instead of the number of trains getting to stations on time, perhaps we would get more useful information if we tracked the number of people being delivered to stations on time.

The majority of rail journeys occur in two bands during the day, when people are travelling to and from work. If a problem happens in rush hour, it’s possible that the majority of journeys that day will be delayed, this could be true even if the majority of trains are not. Yet we only publically measure train punctuality. Regarding passengers, we have statistics measuring kilometres travelled, the total number of passengers and capacity.

Presumably, there already exists some method of collecting data about the volume of passengers travelling at different times of the day – train operators, Network Rail and others must use such data when planning train timetables and scheduling maintenance. Such data should be made public. There is a push by government, Passenger Focus and the ORR to make more rail data available and make it available in easy to analyse formats, so change is coming on this front.

Overlaying estimated passenger volumes onto train timetables would give an initial, and fairly reliable, idea of how many people were being delayed. Such a move would switch the focus from trains to people.

It’s perfectly true that it’s easier to accurately measure train punctuality but the current measure underestimates the economic cost of rail delays. This means that train operators, Network Rail and government all make suboptimal investment decisions about rail and related infrastructure projects.

This blog post is not meant as a dig to train operators, Network Rail or any other group. Indeed, any analysis that demonstrates that delays cause higher economic costs than previously thought, might reasonably be used to argue for more funding for rail.

This idea is very simple and I cannot be the first to propose it, although searches via Google and within the ORR and Passenger Focus websites found no reference to the concept. Simple though it is, the idea is compelling. It captures lost economic output and focuses rail network performance on people not rolling stock.

This article also appeared here on the Huffington Post.

Always Coca-Cola

We’re only half way through January and the biggest communications event in 2013 may already have happened. This week, Coca-Cola released its first ever anti-obesity advert.

Under the theme of ‘Coming Together’ the two-minute segment is narrated with a tone not dissimilar to a public service announcement. The message it carries is hardly surprising: personal responsibility.

This is the standard argument used by all industries facing campaigns that say their products present a danger to the public. Without in any way implying a similar order of magnitude, the personal responsibility argument is also used by tobacco companies and the U.S. gun lobby. It is used for the simple reason that it is the only viable argument available.

In the case of tobacco, the argument is doing little but marginally delaying the inevitable decline of the industry. Coca-Cola, however, is playing a stronger hand and playing it well. They’re using their entire portfolio to deflect attention from their ubiquitous, sugary, calorific core product.

The advert speaks of average calorie reductions across all its drinks brands and the fact that 180 of its 650 U.S. beverage products contain either low- or no-calories. It speaks of the availability of smaller portions and, usefully, manages to squeeze in a big Coca-Cola logo every few seconds. What the advert resolutely does not do is refer to the sales volumes, calorie and sugar content of its biggest selling product.

Coke has spent many years developing a wide range of products and, particularly in recent years, this has included plain bottled waters and drinks that are supposedly healthy such as its Vitaminwater brand. These products are now being used by the parent company to protect its most valuable asset. In a sense, they’re coming together to protect Coke from ruinous legislation and regulatory burdens in the same way that Coca-Cola want us to come together to fight obesity.

From a communications point of view, the other notable aspect of Coke’s advert is that it’s really a lobbying campaign dressed up as a public service message. It delivers the personal responsibility message to millions of people. No doubt it will be coupled with digital campaigns, media outreach, lobbying in Washington and at an individual state level, community action groups and more. It is an excellent example of communications doing two things that it always should: being properly integrated; and delivering a clear business objective.

Who would I back to be the first to really win a public health debate using the personal responsibility argument? Coke is it.

This article originally appeared here on the Huffington Post.

For whom the skeuomorphic keystroke clicks

Skeuomorphism is a hot topic in design at the moment and most of the words directed at it aren’t kind.  Do the pages of eBooks need to mimic the folding pages of paper books? Do your purchased iBooks really need to sit on a shelf when they’re really just files in a folder? Some say it lacks originality, others that it limits creativity. My issue with it is far, far more prosaic. It involves tiny clicking noises.

Commuting. Many of us do it. We sit, stand and contort our bodies on buses, tubes and trains. Some read papers, increasing numbers while away the time texting, tweeting and bidding on eBay. Most of us do so silently, but everyone once in a while it happens. Click, click, clickety, click. It’s low and irregular but constant. Click, click, clickety, click. Someone hasn’t turned of the artificial keystroke noises on their phone. Gah! Now, I know it’s a minor irritant. In fact, to even call it an irritant is probably overstating it.

Why though do these clicks exist? More importantly, why one earth is the default setting for the clicks to be on? There’s no shortage of behavioural economics papers that demonstrate that people are lazy – if you make them opt out of the click, click, clickety, click, they simply will not do it. So if you made them opt in, then the incidence rate would drop dramatically.

It would be petty to start some sort of campaign to switch the default setting, but it seemed reasonable to ask some folk on Twitter why the default is set to Click, click, clickety, click. So that’s what I did.

The first idea pitched focused on accuracy. Perhaps, speculated the tweeter, the clicks make typing more accurate. There is some merit to this argument, you certainly know you’ve clicked on a key. However, keys also change colour – another skeuomorphic touch to give the effect of depression, so you see that you hit a ‘enter’ or ‘post’. Moreover, a click merely confirms that you’ve hit a key, not that you’ve hit the right key. As such it might aid speed but I’m uncertain it helps accuracy per se.

https://twitter.com/DrPizza/status/289493713321852929

The next contribution can be classified as the Audio Slave theory. In the same way that digital cameras make a fake shutter noise, perhaps the click, click, clickety, click is just reassurance for those who need their technology to be mimic times gone by.

Someone else suggested that it was a way of demonstrating features. Perhaps the marketing whizzes at phone manufacturers believe new phone owners power up their device and, on hearing the first click, think, “Ooh, it’s got speakers.” I hope no marketer thinks that.

The final idea was transition. Perhaps phone manufacturers are just providing some familiar noises to ease people into new technology. This argument falls down because back when phones had actual physical keys, they still added artificial noises.

https://twitter.com/adityabhaskar/status/289512352930467840

I can only conclude that the click, click, clickety, click is with us today because it was with us yesterday and the day before and the day before that. It’s because keystrokes are such a small detail, no one has ever stopped to say, “Can it be better?”

It can and it should, but it’s not a big deal.

FT survey of economists: UK house prices

The FT has published a survey of 94 economists on a range of issues. Unsurprisingly, the majority believe house prices in the UK are still too high. Leaving aside the abstract discussions of whether the concept of prices being ‘too high’ is valid, I thought it would be interesting to see if there was a simple way of extracting some findings from the results. Helpfully, the FT has published a full transcript of answers.

The obvious way to simple insights seemed to be creating a word cloud (see below). A cursory glance shows that words high, London and supply seem to be the central themes. So, an interesting survey, but nothing new.

UK house prices - word cloud

Source: FT.com